Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow 1) (9 page)

They’d been out carousing. Three young people, blind drunk.

Back at Shep’s, Muriel gave Socrates the eye. He danced with her until Shep broke it up. But then Shep fell asleep. When he awoke to find them rolling on the floor the fight broke out in earnest.

Socrates knocked Shep back to the floor and then he finished his business with Muriel even though she was worried about her man. But when she started to scream and she hit Socrates with that chair he hit her back.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when he woke up, that he realized that his friends were dead.

Then he’d spent twenty-seven years in prison. Now, eight years free, fifty-eight years old, he was starting life over again.

Not one of those girls, nor Anton Crier, was alive when he started his journey. If they were lucky they wouldn’t understand him.

{2.}

There was a large electric clock above the office. The sweep hand reared back and then battered up against each second, counting every one like a drummer beating out time on a slave galley.

Socrates could see the young assistant manager through the window under the clock. He was saying something to an older white woman sitting there. The woman looked down at Socrates and then swiveled in her chair to a file cabinet. She took out a piece of paper and held it while lecturing Anton. He reached for the paper a couple of times but the woman kept it away from him and continued talking. Finally she said something and Crier nodded. He took the paper from her and left the office, coming down the external stairs at a fast clip. Walking past the checkers he managed not to look at Socrates before he was standing there in front of him.

“Here,” he said, handing the single-sheet application form to Socrates. Crier never stopped moving. As soon as Socrates had the form between his fingers the younger man was walking away.

Socrates touched the passing elbow and asked, “You got a pencil?”

“What?”

“I need a pencil to fill out this form.”

“You, you, you can just send it in.”

“I didn’t come all this way for a piece’a paper, man. I come to apply for a job.”

Anton Crier stormed over to one of the checkers, demanded her pencil, then rushed back to Socrates.

“Here,” he said.

Socrates answered, “Thank you,” but the assistant manager was already on his way back to the elevated office.

H
alf an hour later Socrates was standing at the foot of the stairs leading up to Anton and his boss. He stood there waiting for one of them to come down. They could see him through the window.

They knew he was there.

So Socrates waited, holding the application in one hand and the borrowed pencil in the other.

After twenty minutes he was wondering if a brick could break the wall of windows at the front of the store.

After thirty minutes he decided that it might take a shotgun blast.

Thirty-nine minutes had gone by when the woman, who had bottled red hair, came down to meet him. Anton Crier shadowed her. Socrates saw the anger in the boy’s face.

“Yes? Can I help you?” Halley Grimes asked. She had a jail-house smile—insincere and crooked.

“I wanted to ask a couple of things about my application.”

“All the information is right there at the top of the sheet.”

“But I had some questions.”

“We’re very busy, sir.” Ms. Grimes broadened her smile to show that she had a heart, even for the aged and confused. “What do you need to know?”

“It asks here if I got a car or a regular ride to work.”

“Yes,” beamed Ms. Grimes. “What is it exactly that you don’t understand?”

“I understand what it says but I just don’t get what it means.”

The look of confusion came into Halley Grimes’s face. Socrates welcomed a real emotion.

He answered her unasked question. “What I mean is that I don’t have a car or a ride but I can take a bus to work.”

The store manager took his application form and fingered the address.

“Where is this street?” she asked.

“Down Watts.”

“That’s pretty far to go by bus, isn’t it? There are stores closer than this one, you know.”

“But I could get here.” Socrates noticed that his head wanted to move as if to the rhythm of a song. Then he heard it: “Baby Love,” by Diana Ross and the Supremes. It was being played softly over the loudspeaker. “I could get here.”

“Well.” Ms. Grimes seemed to brighten. “We’ll send this in to the main office and, if it’s clear with them, we’ll put it in our files. When there’s an opening we’ll give you a call.”

“A what?”

“A call. We’ll call you if you’re qualified and if a job opens up.”

“Uh, well, we got to figure somethin’ else than that out. You see, I don’t have no phone.”

“Oh, well then.” Ms. Grimes held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t see that there’s anything we can do. The main office demands a phone number. That’s how they check on your address. They call.”

“How do they know that they got my address just ’cause’ a some phone they call? Wouldn’t it be better if they wrote me?”

“I’m very busy, sir. I’ve told you that we need a phone number to process this application.” Halley Grimes held out the form toward Socrates. “Without that there really isn’t anything I can do.”

Socrates kept his big hands down. He didn’t want to take the application back—partly because he didn’t want to break the pudgy white woman’s fingers.

“Do me a favor and send it in,” he said.

“I told you …”

“Just send it in, okay? Send it in. I’ll be back to find out what they said.”

“You don’t …”

“Just send it in.” There was violence in this last request.

Halley Grimes pulled the application away from his face and said, “All right. But it won’t make any difference.”

{3.}

Socrates had to transfer on three buses to get back to his apartment.

And he was especially tired that day. Talking to Crier and Grimes had worn him out.

He boiled potatoes and eggs in a saucepan on his single hot plate and then cut them together in the pot with two knives, adding mustard and sweet pickle relish. After the meal he had two shots of whiskey and one Camel cigarette.

He was asleep by nine o’clock.

His dream blared until dawn.

I
t was a realistic sort of dream; no magic, no impossible wish. It was just Socrates in a nine-foot cell with a flickering fluorescent light from the walkway keeping him from sleeping and reading, giving him a headache, hurting his eyes.

“Mr. Bennett,” the sleeping Socrates called out from his broad sofa. He shouted so loudly that a mouse in the kitchen jumped up and out of the potato pan pinging his tail against the thin tin as he went.

Socrates heard the sound in his sleep. He turned but then slipped back into the flickering, painful dream.

“What you want?” the guard asked. He was big and black and meaner than anyone Socrates had ever known.

“I cain’t read. I cain’t sleep. That light been like that for three days now.”

“Put the pillow on your head,” the big guard said.

“I cain’t breathe like that,” Socrates answered sensibly.

“Then don’t,” Mr. Bennett replied.

As the guard walked away, Socrates knew, for the first time really, why they kept him in that jail. He would have killed Bennett if he could have right then; put his fingers around that fat neck and squeezed until the veins swelled and cartilage popped and snapped. He was so mad that he balled his fists in his sleep twenty-five years after the fact.

He was a sleeping man wishing that he could sleep. And he was mad, killing mad. He couldn’t rest because of the crackling, buzzing light, and the more it shone the angrier he became. And the angrier he got the more scared he was. Scared that he’d kill Bennett the first chance he got.

The anger built for days in that dream. The sound of grinding teeth could be heard throughout Socrates’ two rooms.

Finally, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he took his rubber squeeze ball in his left hand and slipped his right hand through the bars. He passed the ball through to his right hand and gauged its weight in the basket of his fingers. He blinked back at the angry light, felt the weight of his hard rubber ball. The violent jerk started from his belly button, traveled up through his chest and shoulder, and down until his fingers tensed like steel. The ball flew in a straight line that shattered the light, broke it into blackness.

And in the jet night he heard Bennett say, “That’s the last light you get from the state of Indiana.”

S
ocrates woke up in the morning knowing that he had cried. He could feel the strain in the muscles of his throat. He got out of bed thinking about Anton Crier and Halley Grimes.

{4.}

“You what?” asked Stony Wile. He’d run into Socrates getting off a bus on Central and offered to buy his friend a beer. They went to Moody’s bar on 109th Street.

“I been down there ev’ry day for five days. An ev’ry day I go in there I ask’em if they got my okay from the head office yet.”

“An’ what they say about that?”

“Well, the first day that boy, that Anton Crier, just said no. So I left. Next day he told me that I had to leave. But I said that I wanted to talk to his boss. She come down an’ tell me that she done already said how I cain’t work there if I don’t have no phone.”

“Yeah,” asked Stony Wile. “Then what’d you do?”

“I told’em that they should call downtown and get some kinda answer on me because I was gonna come back ev’ryday till I get some kinda answer.” There was a finality in Socrates’ voice that opened Stony’s eyes wide.

“You don’t wanna do sumpin’ dumb now, Socco,” he said.

“An’ what would that be?”

“They could get you into all kindsa trouble, arrest you for trespassin’ if you keep it up.”

“Maybe they could. Shit. Cops could come in here an’ blow my head off too, but you think I should kiss they ass?”

“But that’s different. You got to stand up for yo’ pride, yo’ manhood. But I don’t see it wit’ this supermarket thing.”

“Well,” Socrates said. “On Thursday Ms. Grimes told me that the office had faxed her to say I wasn’t qualified for the position. She said that she had called the cops and said that I’d been down there harassin’ them. She said that they said that if I ever come over there again that they would come arrest me. Arrest me! Just for tryin’ t’get my rights.”

“That was the fourth day?” Stony asked to make sure that he was counting right.

“Uh-huh. That was day number four. I asked her could I see that fax paper but she said that she didn’t have it, that she threw it out. You ever hear’a anything like that? White woman workin’ for a white corporation throwin’ out paperwork?”

Stony was once a shipbuilder but now worked on a fishing day boat out of San Pedro. He’d been in trouble before but never in jail. He’d never thought about the thousands of papers he’d signed over his life; never wondered where they went.

“Why wouldn’t they throw them away?” Stony asked.

“Because they keep ev’ry scrap’a paper they got just as long as it make they case in court.”

Stony nodded. Maybe he understood.

“So I called Bounty’s head office,” Socrates said. “Over in Torrence.”

“You lyin’.”

“An’ why not? I applied for that job, Stony. I should get my hearin’ wit’ them.”

“What’d they say?”

“That they ain’t never heard’a me.”

“You lyin’,” Stony said again.

“Grimes an’ Crier the liars. An’ you know I went down there today t’tell’em so. I was up in Anton’s face when he told me that Ms. Grimes was out. I told him that they lied and that I had the right to get me a job.”

“An’ what he say?”

“He was scared. He thought I mighta hit’im. And I mighta too except Ms. Grimes comes on down.”

“She was there?”

“Said that she was on a lunch break; said that she was gonna call the cops on me. Shit. I called her a liar right to her face. I said that she was a liar and that I had a right to be submitted to the main office.” Socrates jabbed his finger at Stony as if he were the one holding the job hostage. “I told’er that I’d be back on Monday and that I expected some kinda fair treatment.”

“Well that sounds right,” Stony said. “It ain’t up to her who could apply an’ who couldn’t. She got to be fair.”

“Yeah,” Socrates answered. “She said that the cops would be waitin’ for me on Monday. Maybe Monday night you could come see me in jail.”

{5.}

On Saturday Socrates took his canvas cart full of cans to the Boys Market on Adams. He waited three hours behind Calico, an older black woman who prowled the same streets he did, and two younger black men who worked as team.

Calico and DJ and Bernard were having a good time waiting. DJ was from Oakland and had come down to L.A. to stay with his grandmother when he was fifteen. She died a year later so he had to live on the streets since then. But DJ didn’t complain. He talked about how good life was and how much he was able to collect on the streets.